Mr. Willie Noone:

I will answer the ones that are specific to Bord na Móna. On the workforce and how its members have taken to what is occurring, the reaction has been fairly pragmatic. The people in Bord na Móna knew this was coming. They knew there was a plan to get out of peat production in the next decade and they had resigned themselves to that fact. The problem is that has now been fast-tracked. People thought they would have another decade in peat production but it has been fast-tracked and that has put people under a great deal of pressure.

Regarding the age profile, the median age of the people on the bogs is 56, which is fairly high. However, many jobs have been earmarked to be got rid of, for want of a better term, in Newbridge, and the majority of those are not bog-related. Many women work in office jobs. It has been lost on the public that many of the jobs due to end are not just those on the bogs.

On reclaiming the sites and using them for forestry, the problem is that trees do not grow on bogs. Some trees do but the majority of those of any value do not. That is a red herring.

With regard to the way the people in Bord na Móna have been treated, they have been treated abysmally, and people should know that. Some politicians have come out in the media and announced they were doing a great service to the members in Bord na Móna by getting the stakeholder to provide a voluntary severance package. What they did not say was that the voluntary severance package does not give many of these people one cent more than they would get if they were working in non-unionised employment.

People over 62 are only getting statutory redundancy. There are people in Bord na Móna who, under this new voluntary severance package, will be told they are in a location with no job. The package only offers such people half of what they would otherwise earn and there is no job for them. They are not getting one extra red cent from this new redundancy package. In fact they are worse off but the politicians who raced to the media did not tell them that. This package denies these people their pension entitlements. Their current pension states, quite clearly, that if they retire before 60 years of age, they can draw their pension if they go voluntarily but there will be an actuarial reduction. That has been taken away. I got confirmation from the company no more than an hour ago, before I came in here, that it will be worse than ever before. That is scandalous. It is scandalous of people from the Government parties to say they are doing a great service to these Bord na Móna people. Deputies from the midlands have said this in their own constituency. They have not said these employees are going to be worse off, however. It is abysmal.

That said, jobs in the midlands will be very hard to get. Bord na Móna has a landbank of big acreage but it will be confined in what it can do on that. Trees do not grow on bogs. There is a lot of opposition to wind farms and people have objected. There is a lot of not in my backyard, NIMBYism, going on. The company has come forward with some good ideas on alternative employment but many of those projects will take time to get up and running because they are startup businesses. The age profile of current staff members at Bord na Móna means the vast majority of them will not be able to redeploy to new jobs.

We are anxious that whatever would come up for new employment ideas would specifically target the midlands. It is the people in the towns and villages of the midlands who are going to suffer. I am from the midlands myself so I know all about it. They are really going to suffer because of this process.

The next industry to be affected is the ESB in respect of the coal being burned in ESB stations. I am concerned about it because Mr. Jim Dullaghan and I both have members in the sector. ESB is possibly next in line to be caught in this decarbonisation process.